There was zero mercy in my father’s eyes, zero give, and zero chance he was going to change his mind…but he was the one who’d asked me to come here. Didn’t he remember?

Screw this. Screw all of this. He was never going to listen. He’d made up his mind the moment he read the report Xander had promised not to show him.

I turned around and walked out of the house, letting the screen door slam behind me. Rocks jabbed into my feet as I hit the drive. Shit. I’d left my boots inside. Whatever. I had another ten pairs in the Jeep. I’d find a hotel—

“Cam!” Xander yelled as I reached the Jeep.

I climbed in, but he got to the door before I could close it. A set of keys jangled from his outstretched fingers, but I kept my eyes straight ahead, refusing to see the inevitable pity in his eyes.

“Go to my place. This will all blow over. I promise.”

He’d made that same promise when the mood of the house hadn’t lifted six months after Mom’s funeral. Xander’s optimism was a giant heap of lies he told himself to make swallowing the shit easier.

“No,” I replied. The last place I wanted to be was in Mayor Daniels’s house, getting my dirt all over his perfect life. I didn’t even know where he lived.

“Come on,” he pled. “I’ve got HBO.”

“Don’t watch much TV.”

“You’re still so damned stubborn,” he muttered, digging into his pocket and retrieving another set of keys, this one with an eighties-style Broncos stallion on the key chain. “Then, at least go up to Uncle Cal’s house. Well, I mean, technically he left it to you, so it’s your house.”

Uncle Cal. The one person I’d been able to lean on. The only guy who’d ever understood the rage that always seemed to simmer just beneath my surface.

Xander shook the keys. “Come on. Don’t go to a hotel. None of the tourist places up here are open yet, and it’s a forty-five-minute drive back to Buena Vista. The electricity still works up there, and the water runs. I check it every month. It’s not like I’ve dusted or anything, and it’s not the Four Seasons, but it’s yours. Do it for me, please. I can’t watch you drive away and wait another six years to see if you’ll come back.”

“I’m not leaving the state, for Christ’s sake. Just Dad’s house,” I promised. I’d had no intention of coming back when I left last time. We’d both known it. I couldn’t blame him for that touch of worry in his voice, so I took the keys, and he sighed in relief.

“I’ll check on you tomorrow.”